Sunday, February 24, 2013

Les Misérables - Too Much Singing!

So I recently saw Les Misérables.  It was the first time I ever saw it in movie form or otherwise.  My immediate reaction after watching it was, "All they did was sing, there was no talking."  I'm used to musicals where it's half acting and half singing, and things just seemed out of whack in Les Misérables.

I wasn't sure if I was just imagining this, so I looked up the number of musical numbers in the following musicals. The musicals I selected are pretty much at random, whatever came to mind. I didn't bother to differentiate between orchestra only or singing numbers, b/c I haven't seen all of these.  I just counted the number of different items listed on Wikipedia.


Musical Number of Musical Numbers
Les Misérables 50
Wicked 21
The Sound of Music 26
Phantom of the Opera 39
My Fair Lady 24
Cats 27
Chicago 21
The Book of Mormon 22
Grease 21
West Side Story 27
American Idiot 30


So I guess I wasn't imagining things, there are just way more musical numbers than the average musical.

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